He's reached his term limit anyway.

There is no silver lining here. This is fucking grotesque on every available level.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well said and sadly absolutely true.

Phantom

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes.

And now this quote takes on a truly terrifying relevence.
*Sigh*

I have a friend, a little older than myself, who lives down in Nevada. He was hit by a car when he was 18 and while he did finish college, a whole host of health issues stemming from this have left him unable to work. (Among other things, his lungs are constantly trying to poison him.) Prior to 2010, he was completely uninsurable.

Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell are going to try and murder him.

I have another friend over in Connecticut, in New Haven. No, not the Yaley part of New Haven, the slightly sketchy part. His mother is 72. She's not Medicare-eligible; she was a teacher, and never had the taxes taken out of her pay because it was assumed her retirement benefits would provide. Which they would have if some union-busting hadn't eviscerated them. Prior to 2010, she was completely uninsurable.

Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell are going to try and murder her.

That is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Cops being able to murder black people with impunity will continue and, most likely, accelerate. Voter suppression will continue and accelerate as well. Ethnic cleansing is a real possibility. Whoever replaces Scalia is likely to think ol' Nino was a commie squish, and Ginsburg and Breyer are long in the tooth. The overturn of Obergefell and Roe are real possibilities as well, as are the overturning of the Great Society and the New Deal.

This is going to be a national nightmare that makes us long for the halcyon days of the Avignon Presidency.

I'm going to say it bluntly: if you voted for Donald Trump, you're a bad person. At best, you are so stunningly ignorant as to have failed in your basic duty as a citizen. At worst, you're a racist scumbag of the type that's plagued the Republic since we were haggling in Philadelphia over just what percentage of a real person a black person was worth.

-Merc
Keep Rat

A thought: What if everybody who needs the Affordable Care Act in order to have insurance sent their photograph to the White House, addressed "Hold for President Donald Trump," along with a letter saying, "My name is <NAME>, and I need the Affordable Care Act." It could go longer, explaining the details, but the primary point would be to show that there's people who depend on this for survival.

I can't send such a letter; it wouldn't be true for me. But it's true for other people - perhaps a large amount of people.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Those people are losers, not winners like Trump is. He hates losers. They suck! If they were winners they wouldn't be sick or would be rich enough to afford insurance.

Also, to be blunt: he's a Republican. "Let them die" is part of the party platform. It was in 2012 and it was this year as well.

-Merc
Keep Rat

He's not a Republican, he's... you know that brain-replacing fungus that makes dying ants act against antly interests so as to create opportunities for the fungus to infest further ants? He's that. Actual Republicans are the ants.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I would have to disagree with you on that one, Ben.

Trump didn't trick and stunt his way into power. He won the Republican nomination in a walk, with an enormously strong plurality, and evidence is strong that even in a more winnowed field he'd have won outright majorities. These were rank-and-file Republicans, the people you meet on the street and work alongside and are related to, and they said "Trump!"

Then when he was the nominee, basically every Republican leader in active politics endorsed him. A tiny handful tried to thread the needle, like Kelly Ayotte's shameful and cowardly "I'm not endorsing Donald Trump, I'm just saying you should vote for him" two-step, but they basically accepted him as legitimate.

He won office on the backs of the sixty million-ish mostly Republicans who voted him in.

Trump is a Republican. The Republican Party loves him, endorses him, and is enthusiastic for him. Even your states own Susan Collins, beloved as a "moderate" figure within the Party, will vote enthusiastically for the witches brew he will send to Congress and the Federalist Society hacks he will send to the Supreme Court.

This has been a long time coming. The transformation of the Republican Party that began in 1964 is largely complete. The Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower, of John Chafee, of Chris Shays and Nelson Rockefeller and even Bill Weld, is dead. This is the party of Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Kris Kobach, and Hans von Spakovsky. It's an inchoate scream of rage made manifest.

There is no ant.

There is only the fungus.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Which is essentially what I meant. Trump isn't a Republican; all but a handful of modern Republicans aren't Republicans, any more than modern Democrats are Democrats in the sense that would have been understood at the time of the Republican Party's founding.

I mean to say, if I had been born a hundred years earlier, and ended up with the same basic set of views I have as an adult (which is improbable, I grant you, but stay with me here), I would almost certainly have been a Republican, or at least leaned toward them much as I lean (with some repugnance) toward the Democrats today. I'd have voted for Theodore Roosevelt. Hell, I'd probably have broken with the Republican Party in 1912 to vote for him again (and in a sense that's where the party started to go wrong, I would contend, not 1964—when TR peeled off most of the moderate/progressive wing and inadvertently recast the GOP as America's Tories). He, and those of his bent, to say nothing of the likes of Lincoln and Seward, wouldn't recognize what had become of their party by the middle of the 20th century, let alone now. Now they wouldn't even recognize it as a political party.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Right. I keep thinking that Trump has a broader range of caring.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

"There's little room in Tupolev's heart for anyone but Tupolev."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...I got nothin' witty to say. I am shocked and appalled beyond the capacity for rational thought.

Well, he did go on record saying that the elections were rigged...
Not that I was overly thrilled with either option, so I didn't give either my support.

Thus, essentially, robbing yourself of any right to complain about anything that happens over the next four years.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

It always annoys me when someone trots out this hoary old chestnut, because it's not true. That's not the way it works.

I suspect that right will be removed for us by the incoming administration, as soon as they find someone to burn the Reichstag for them. But that's not the way it works.

Instead, this time around, thanks to the way the electoral system works, an uncast vote was effectively a vote for Chump. So thanks for that, abstainers. We'll see how your principled indifference plays out for everybody.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And for the record, I voted libertarian. As much as I wanted to seriously write in for Cthulu (because why vote for a LESSER evil??) that really would have been throwing my vote away.

But at least you stuck to your principles.

And he was right, but not in the way he intended.

>Not that I was overly thrilled with either option, so I didn't give
>either my support.

Then you failed in your basic responsibility as a citizen. The only time not voting is ever appropriate is if you're in a banana republic where they're going to shred your ballot if it doesn't have the "right" choice on it anyway, or actively engaged in armed, extralegal insurrection against the government.

Many, many people view voting as some kind of personal moral and consumer choice. They insist they won't vote for anyone who does not 100% reflect their values and that if this results in suboptimal outcomes, well, maybe next time the political parties should give them someone they agree with.

That's bullshit.

Voting is about two things; politics, and power. It is about making the decision that is best for the country, for you and your fellow citizens, regardless of how morally validated it makes you feel. It means that if your only choices are the guy who will cut off everyone's heads, and the guy who will cut off everyone's arms, you vote for the arm-cutter because you can live through that. Declaring "I'm going to write in the guy who isn't going to cut off any of my appendages at all!" or "these guys suck, I'm going to stay home" is a failure on your part to responsibly block the legions of head-cutters.

I get it. You don't like our system. But absent it being changed, you largely have to work within it. We aren't Germany or Israel, with various proportional-voting schemes in place. In those countries, you have the election, and then you form the governing coalition.

We do it the opposite way around here. The governing coalition is formed prior to the election, not after it. The candidates presented by the Republican and Democratic Parties are the result of coalitional politics, determined by their primary voters and jockeying among interest groups. Once the compromising is done, you end up with a compromised candidate. If you want to vote for someone who makes you feel good? Win the coalition fight. Join a party and fight to make it reflect you, and when you incur the inevitable losses in that regard support your coalition partners anyway because they're still better than the alternative and one day, when you win the intra-coalition fight, you will make the same demand of them.

A guy who voted for Trump because he really, sincerely believes Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster at Mena Airport while high on cocaine and had the body dumped in the Whitewater development and is conspiring with Huma Abedin (her sekrit lover) to impose sharia law and appoint an all-Muslim Brotherhood cabinet succeeded at his citizenship obligations in a more complete way than you did. His beliefs are grotesquely and completely wrong, but he weighed the candidates and decided "Trump might be a fascist but he's the lesser evil compared to the Hildebeast."

You could not be bothered to even get to that point.

You washed your hands.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Fortunately for you there's already precedent stating that same-sex marriages performed while legal are still recognized as valid even after the law legalizing them was overturned. I'm sure there would be a lot of other mess involved, but your marriage should remain intact.

Hopefully you won't have to put that to the test (or anyone else, for that matter).

Offsides (who's sorely disappointed that his state turned red this year)

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

We'll still be doing some planning for the worst even as we hope for the best, just in case. Probably involving a consult with a lawyer and making up paperwork to substitute for/reinforce our "rights of marriage" such as living wills, wills, powers of attorney in case either of us incapacitated, etc. And we'll probably need to do so before the economic collapse comes upon us.

Much of my primary worry right now is for the few of my friends who are on mental-illness related disability, and all that entails. The Republicans have made no big secret that they'd like to throw people who can't work, regardless of the reason, into the Woodchipper of Capitalism after they've removed the safety net over the feed chute. By doing the either/or/and of removing their ability to qualify for disability (on account of having an invisible but very real illness), and stripping their ability to get any healthcare at all. My worry is to the point that I am expecting one or both to potentially commit suicide rather than face the abject misery being homeless and at the mercy of their mind demons for the rest of their lives

>Offsides (who's sorely disappointed that his state turned red this
>year)

Here I'm sorely disappointed in the rest of the country. On the other hand, it's made our list of selections for vacation destinations considerably smaller. Even if it was 25% actively voting for the bigotry, it was still 25%, and the bigots are not going to ignore that. Some of those states were already in the "no visit" list, but I now have a nice, handy single reference graphic for it, rather than having to look up various news articles about Religious Freedom Acts and Bathroom Bills.